Grief House - Portals

In this episode about feelings Sascha and I call our wants over. We watch them move and tell each other what we see.  Then we hand our want creatures to our friend (and Portals editor) Sid and he makes music they can dance to.  I wasn't at all sure how this experiment would turn out but in the end what came is exactly what I wanted.

In this episode about feelings Sascha and I discuss what it's like to want. We consider categories of want, wonder about the difference between wanting things for ourselves and wanting things for our beloveds and explore what lessons the tea cup carnival ride has to teach us about want. We consider want in the parent-child relationship where it quite often feels bright and like survival and w...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about how it feels to hold people in our hearts, thoughts and consciousness.  We consider what it's like to be born, again and again, into vessels that then wander off holding you however they see fit. What it's like to carry someone who doesn't know you have them. What it's like to carry someone who may or may not be alive. We think about how...

In this episode Sascha and I discuss the many iterations of our birth.  We consider what it means to be born into a communal reality that's made from individual realities that overlap like bubbles in foam, how it's possible to be born into someone's world years and years before they're born into yours, and what happens when you begin to suspect birth is an act of creative inven...

In this episode Sascha and I contemplate how Gods soak through the fabric of reality. We wonder how to best maintain open, nourished portals - how to live like everything might be a doorway to divinity.  This is another of our special, scored episodes. Our friend Parsa makes sound doors through which our gods come dancing. It's quite magical and completely good. We hope you'll come lie i...

This month on Portals we discuss fucking up. We talk about what it's like to make mistakes, hurt people and stay close, and what it's like when we can't stay close. We discuss the merits of a fallible God - how much we might learn from a deity who messes up and is still worthy of trusting with the care and tending of our souls.

In this episode about magic (which we recorded in-person during Sascha's visit to Portland), our friend Parsa, who makes music for our feeling creatures, joins us with his voice! Sascha and Parsa agree to play a game where we take turns overhearing each other talk about our magic. It's like cloud gazing but the clouds make pictures of our mysteries. I love it so much I can hardly contain...

In this episode on trust, Sascha and I discuss the importance of magic. We explore the ways we were raised to believe and where our belief grows brittle. We wonder about the patriarchy and how it got to be in charge of what is and isn't real. We decide we don't have an interest in valuing things based on the extent to which they benefit the  post-agrarian, capitalist machine and decide t...

In this episode Sascha and I explore what it's like  to love things that are stuck and staying stuck or moving deeper into stickiness; to know your love won't fix the thing you love or free it, and still give it well and fully, and with all your heart.

This moth at The Grief House we're looking at how it feels to be stuck - in shirts, the pharmaceutical industry, our eagerness to end all pain. We wonder how to make space inside tangles and how to lie down, trapped in confusion, and cry ourselves calm.

In this episode Sascha and I explore the path from cultivation to wilderness. We discuss the botanical term wildering: a plant that has run wild or escaped cultivation , wonder about fenced wilderness and the wisdom of elk, and consider how long a person should sit with their dirty ferns in a sanitized lunch room before they give up hope for a meadow. We think, maybe, forever. We hope you'll...

From the moment we occur in this iteration of consciousness we are transforming. Our bodies are lost and replaced thousands of times. Some day you might be old. What if you are, and it is great? What if it's more like magic than anything you've known so far?  Most likely our predictions about what's coming next don't alter the course of our glorious fall, so - why not predict t...

In this short episode our friend Parsa offers us his beautiful shaking in the form of piano music. It shakes out worlds and worlds and I share one of them.

In this trust episode Sascha and I discuss the experience of living in constantly aging bodies.  We talk about deals we've struck with fear, our soft bellies, reunions with our former incarnations and the joy of declining to run in the race. We wonder how it would feel to have more models of glorious women we might some day become, decide it would feel good, and begin to invent a gallery of o...

In this episode about loss and acceptance Sascha and I discuss what happens when loss is offered and we decline. How does it look to decide to stay despite external cues that insist leaving makes the most sense. What happens when someone leaves you, but you don't leave them back. We discuss the tired dogs guarding our wall-less houses, the way painful no's can tether us tight and whether...

In this very special episode our friend Parsa scores Sascha and my pleasure. We then play with laying the different pleasure offerings down on top of each other.  It is the best thing in the world and Sascha and I both die and are reborn several times while listening to it.  We wonder about pleasure and perception; whether or not pleasure can ever occur in isolation. We think about cycles of pleas...

In this episode Sascha and I discuss our Loss Badgers. We explore what it's like to live with them in various states of acceptance. We talk about their teeth, their smell and the way they act in public. We contemplate the merits of suits for Loss Badgers and special shoes for wading in Loss Badger lakes. We make plans to build ecosystems where the Loss Badgers can roam in all their glorious p...

In this first episode of our month-long exploration of pleasure, we look at expected and unexpected pleasure, wonder about how fear limits and enhances pleasure, and how we trade in types and shades of pleasure. We talk about the complex pleasures of live music, ravenous zombie-fish, sour cream and onion potato chips and tearing barbecued flesh from the bone and how welcomed and acknowledged grief...

In this episode Sascha and I talk about time as a many layered thing. We discuss truths of our mothers, the truths of our childhoods, and truths about love,  We consider what it feels like to imagine truths of different moments collecting and collaborating rather than replacing each other. Liking how this feels, we proclaim it our reality.

In this episode we discuss the nature of time. What does she look like when we aren't watching. What do we look like from her perspective?  We wonder about all the ways we interact with time - spending her, saving her, wasting her, keeping her  - the games we play with her as individuals and communities. We consider which of them help us, which of them hurt us, and whether there's a way...

In this episode Sascha and I introduce our comfort creatures.  We consider Comfort as a formica table top, a sandwich a calm place in the woods. We wonder about the way our comfort loves us, the way it feels to be with her, the way she can be overlooked. We imagine our comfort creatures spending an afternoon with our fear creatures. We wish we could spend time sitting in a one of those ball rooms...

In this episode we discuss grief in all its ambiguity. We talk about grief's waiting room and what it's like to linger there, the intersection between chaos and order, how boxes can be used for liberation and knives can be used to open jars. We explore the notion that some loss might be more real than other loss, and try to nail down, for certain, whether any loss is unambiguous.  At the...

In this episode Sascha and I build playgrounds for our fear creatures and watch them swing and slide while we sip coffee on a bench off to the side.  We discuss how to be friends with a creature that swallows you every night after dark, the dimensionality of fear, fear as a paper doll, a shadow and The Babadook. We discuss the particular horror of being the thing we fear the most and the strange t...

In this episode we discuss death. We talk about our evolving relationships with death as a state of being and our personal relationships with our own deaths. We talk about the hard work of being held, the ways we have tried to evade and defeat death and the evolution of our respective friendships with her.  We have some creative playtime with death, during which we let our deaths dress up in costu...

In this episode Sascha and I perform an act of meta-trust by allowing each other to tell our early experiences of blind trust. We (or at least I) find it surprising and revelatory. We discuss God, backpacks filled with survival tools and the utility of magical thinking. We explore whether or not it is a good idea to trust wolves who hate whistling, women who do face painting at health fairs and po...